Hailed as early Christian texts as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls, yet condemned by the Vatican as Islamic heresies, the Lead books of Granada, written on discs of lead and unearthed on a Granadan hillside, weave a mysterious tale of duplicity and daring set in the religious crucible of sixteenth-century Spain. This book evaluates the cultural status and importance of these polyvalent, ambiguous artefacts which embody many of the dualities and paradoxes inherent in the racial and religious dilemmas of Early Modern Spain. Using the words of key individuals, and set against the background of conflict between Spanish Christians and Moriscos in the late fifteen-hundreds, The Lead Books of Granada tells a story of resilient resistance and creative ingenuity in the face of impossibly powerful negative forces, a resistance embodied by a small group of courageous, idealistic men who lived a double life in Granada just before the expulsion of the Moriscos.

Taking as its main subject a series of notorious forgeries by Muslim converts in sixteenth-century Granada (including an apocryphal gospel in Arabic), this book studies the emotional, cultural and religious world view of the Morisco minority and the complexity of its identity, caught between the wish to respect Arabic cultural traditions, and the pressures of evangelization and efforts at integration into “Old Christian” society. Orientalist scholarship in Early Modern Spain, in which an interest in Oriental languages, mainly Arabic, was linked to important historiographical questions, such as the uses and value of Arabic sources and the problem of the integration of al-Andalus within a providentialist history of Spain, is also addressed. The authors consider these issues not only from a local point of view, but from a wider perspective, in an attempt to understand how these matters related to more general European intellectual and religious developments.

In 1482, Abu Abdallah Muhammad XI became the twenty-third Muslim King of Granada. He would be the last. This is the first history of the ruler, known as Boabdil, whose disastrous reign and bitter defeat brought seven centuries of Moorish Spain to an end. It is an action-packed story of intrigue, treachery, cruelty, cunning, courtliness, bravery and tragedy. Basing her vivid account on original documents and sources, Elizabeth Drayson traces the origins and development of Islamic Spain. She describes the thirteenth-century founding of the Nasrid dynasty, the cultured and stable society it created, and the feuding which threatened it and had all but destroyed it by 1482, when Boabdil seized the throne. The new Sultan faced betrayals by his family, factions in the Alhambra palace, and ever more powerful onslaughts from the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs of the newly united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. By stratagem, diplomacy, courage and strength of will Boabdil prolonged his reign for ten years, but he never had much chance of survival. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, magnificently attired in Moorish costume, entered Granada and took possession of the city. Boabdil went into exile. The Christian reconquest of Spain, that has reverberated so powerfully down the centuries, was complete.

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Prologue. Old Bones for a New City -- 1 Granada in the Sixteenth Century -- 2 Controversy and Propaganda -- 3 Forging History: Granadino Historiography and the Sacromonte -- 4 Civic Ritual and Civic Identity -- 5 The Plomos and the Sacromonte in Granadino Piety -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.

This book contains the whole text of an Inquisition trial of a Morisco (converted Muslim) of Toledo, Spain, condemned to burn at the stake. It is preceded by an introduction which studies the trial and shows the multifaceted aspects of the text and its protagonists.

The essential history of an iconic European city, by Cambridge academic Elizabeth Drayson. 'An admirable achievement... [Drayson has] expertise as a scholar and command as a storyteller' BBC History Magazine 'A glittering homage to one of the world's most beautiful and storied cities' Dan Jones 'Beauty built on blood and brutality... A fascinating new tome' Daily Mail From the early Middle Ages to the present, foreign travellers have been bewitched by Granada's peerless beauty. The Andalusian city is also the stuff of story and legend, with an unforgettable history to match. Romans, then Visigoths, settled here, as did a community of Jews; in the eleventh century a Berber chief made Granada his capital, and from 1230 until 1492 the Nasrids – Spain's last Islamic dynasty – ruled the emirate of Granada from their fortress-palace of the Alhambra. After capturing the city to complete the Christian Reconquista, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella made the Alhambra the site of their royal court. In Lost Paradise, Elizabeth Drayson takes the reader on a voyage of discovery that uncovers the many-layered past of Spain's most complex and fascinating city, celebrating and exploring its evolving identity. Her account brings to the fore the image of Granada as a lost paradise, revealing it as a place of perpetual contradiction and linking it to the great dilemma over Spain's true identity as a nation. This is the story of a vanished Eden, of a place that questions and probes Spain's deep obsession with forgetting, and with erasing historical and cultural memory.

Granada is a deceptive city, concealing a layered past and a complex character. The last Muslim capital in Western Europe, over the centuries it has captured hearts and imaginations, inspiring countless myths and legends. Yet its history reveals even more fascinating tales: secrets and follies, victory and failure, poetry and art. City of Illusions brings together Granada's many stories--the archaeological forger, the renegade French general, the garrotted liberal heroine, the Jewish poet who served two Muslim rulers. This colourful cast of characters takes us from the founding eleventh-century dynasty and the building of the Alhambra, through the Reconquista, French occupation and Spanish Civil War, right up to the present day. Granada's history has long been fought over, rewritten, idealised or buried. This rich, elegant book sets the record straight on a beautiful, elusive city, with all its quirks, mysteries, intrigues and triumphs.

By the middle of the fourteenth century, Christian control of the Iberian Peninsula extended to the borders of the emirate of Granada, whose Muslim rulers acknowledged Castilian suzerainty. No longer threatened by Moroccan incursions, the kings of Castile were diverted from completing the Reconquest by civil war and conflicts with neighboring Christian kings. Mindful, however, of their traditional goal of recovering lands formerly ruled by the Visigoths, whose heirs they claimed to be, the Castilian monarchs continued intermittently to assault Granada until the late fifteenth century. Matters changed thereafter, when Fernando and Isabel launched a decade-long effort to subjugate Granada. Utilizing artillery and expending vast sums of money, they methodically conquered each Naṣrid stronghold until the capitulation of the city of Granada itself in 1492. Effective military and naval organization and access to a diversity of financial resources, joined with papal crusading benefits, facilitated the final conquest. Throughout, the Naṣrids had emphasized the urgency of a jihād waged against the Christian infidels, while the Castilians affirmed that the expulsion of the "enemies of our Catholic faith" was a necessary, just, and holy cause. The fundamentally religious character of this last stage of conflict cannot be doubted, Joseph F. O'Callaghan argues.

The Archive of the Sacromonte Abbey in Granada preserves a historical treasure: Arabic texts on a sheet of parchment and on numerous small tablets of lead, which were discovered in Granada at the end of the sixteenth century in the tower of the old Friday Mosque and in caves of the "Valparaíso" hillock, from then on called "Sacromonte". They became the object of heated discussions in Europe and were condemned by the Pope in 1682. The texts are among the very last literary productions of the Moriscos, the Andalusi Muslims, many of whom continued to practice Islam in secret until their expulsion from Spain between 1609 and 1614. With the permission of the archbishop of Granada, we offer, for the first time in history, a study, edition, translation, and images of all the tablets and shed new light on the fascinating religious messages of these enigmatic texts and their authors.

This book explores the appropriation of Islamic architecture by Spanish historians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illuminating its relationship to the development of Spanish national identity.